The life and times
of the last great American hipster -- From Vaudeville to Vegas -- as seen
through the eyes of his public.

A compendium of
writings on a man hidden at the center of American life, from the editor of the
Muhammad Ali reader

("The best
book ever written about Ali" --Salon)

Sammy Davis, Jr. (1925-90), rose from
childhood stardom on the vaudeville stage to become one
of the most famous African American entertainers of the 1950s
and '60s (and the only black member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack). At
the same time, he spent most of his career surrounded by
controversy and ridicule -- over his affairs with white
film stars like Kim Novak and Jean Seberg; his 1960
marriage to Swedish actress May Britt; his conversion to Judaism;
his closeness to the Kennedys and, later, Richard Nixon;
and his problems with alcohol and drugs.

In an original, frank, and
compassionate introductory essay, editor Gerald Early
brilliantly examines Davis's career and its significance for African
Americans. Other writings in the collection include a
1966 Playboy interview by Alex Haley: an excerpt
from the 1983 autobiography of porn star Linda Lovelace;
profiles from The New Yorker, Life, and The
Saturday Evening Post; and articles from The
Pittsburgh Courier, Confidential, and other
newspapers and magazines. The Sammy Davis, Jr.,
Reader is a composite portrait of a complex, self-conscious man and
the society that treated him, for more than forty years,
with passionate ambivalence.

AuthorGerald Early is the author of The Culture of
Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and
Modern American Culture and the editor of The
Muhammad Ali Reader. He is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters
at Washington University in St. Louis.

The thing to do is to exploit the
meaning of the life you have.
--Ralph Ellison in Conversations with Ralph Ellison,
1960

Why must I always keep proving
myself? . . . Why must I always prove what I'm not
before I can prove what I am?
--Sammy Davis, Jr., Yes I Can

When Sammy Davis, Jr.'s, oldest and
only biological child, Tracey, turned five, he promised
her that he would be home in time for her birthday party.
Hours passed by, the partygoers came and went, Davis did
not show up. In fact, his daughter did not see him until
the next day, when he apologized for failing to appear.
He handed her an envelope that contained her birthday gift. Later,
Davis and his wife, Swedish actress May Britt, had a
heated exchange about his broken promise to his
daughter. Britt was especially annoyed that Davis did
not come to his daughter's birthday party because he was carousing with
his Rat Pack buddies. Davis himself shrugged it off,
saying that Tracey "would have other
birthdays." When she opened the envelope that her father had
given her, she found one hundred dollars. "He
couldn't even go out and buy something special for his
daughter," Tracey wrote in her autobiography, Sammy
Davis, Jr.: My Father, "or even ask one of his assistants
to select a gift ... And so he reached into his pocket
and pulled out a $100 bill."

A $100 bill is a strange gift, even
for a neglectful father, to give a five-year-old child.
What could she possibly do with it? But when Davis was five years old,
he was already performing with his father and Will
Mastin; his relationship with money and his
understanding of it were formed in an entertainer's world
of boom and bust times. Davis's mother, Elvera Sanchez
-- a Puerto Rican dancer -- was also a member of the
Will Mastin Gang, although she did not participate in
the rearing of Davis. She and Sam Davis, Sr., broke up two years later
after having a second child, a daughter named Ramona who
was not reared with Davis, Jr. "I was in show
business by the time I was two years old ... Most kids
have a choice of what they want to be -- I guess you could call
it a misery of choice. Not me. No chance to be
bricklayer or dentist, dockworker or preacher -- I guess
I was meant for show business even before I was born,"
he said in an interview with Roy Newquist. One is struck
here not simply by Davis's sense of predestination but
by his comfort with his fate. Show business makes him a
different order of being from people with more mundane occupations.
Even as a kid, Davis liked to throw money around, the
few times he had any. He describes such an instance in Yes
I Can, his first autobiography, when he tried to
impress a group of unfriendly neighborhood boys by buying
several dollars' worth of baseball cards, then proceeded
to humiliate himself by trading away the most valuable
ones. (Davis knew nothing about baseball or any sport as
a child or as an adult.)

What killed Davis's highly publicized
marriage to Britt -- according to his account in his
second autobiography, Why Me?, and according to his
daughter's book -- was that she wanted a conventional
bourgeois life and he had no fundamental understanding
or appreciation of what that was. He could collect, but
he could not save; he enjoyed instant gratification and found
bourgeois morality hypocritical and unrewarding. He
could be extraordinarily generous with his time and his
money but he could only really give himself in the
context of a stage act, in relation to an audience. Everything else
provided sensation, varying jolts to the nervous system;
nothing but the act provided meaning. Shirley MacLaine
was right when she wrote about Davis: "He had been
cultivated and nourished in the spotlight since he was three years
old. He was only at home when the spotlight was on. So
his sense of his life was BIG and theatrical, because
that's what was real to him."

On the one hand, we might dismiss the
entire story of the missed birthday as typical of an
overly hardworking father who had little interest in filling
his leisure time with domestic activities. On the other
hand, the incident reflects Davis's twin passions: his
candid, tense passion about his work and his career, and
his equally tense but exquisitely wrought fixation on himself
as the only important person to himself. In a 1966
interview, Davis said, "I'm not Sammy Glick [the
cruel and unscrupulous anti-hero of Budd Schulberg's 1941
bestselling novel, What Makes Sammy Run], stepping on people,
destroying people. Why should you be put down because
you're ambitious, because you want to succeed -- so long
as you're not hurting anybody? Jesus! Is it criminal to
have drive?" It is true that malice never seemed to form
a part of Davis's character. His climb to the top was
relentless, not brutal; obsessive, not pathological;
self-inventive, not power hungry. Clearly, Tracey found
her father's drive the most dominant facet of his personality: "It
would be easy to dismiss Dad as merely a workaholic. But
he was more than that. He couldn't just be good; he had
to be great. He couldn't just fulfill a contract; he had
to give 300 percent. And each success just made him crave
more . . . Dad was so focused on making it and staying
on top that he had no idea about half the things that
were going on in his life. By the time he was able to
look up, everything he had truly loved -- besides entertainment
-- had changed or was harmed in some way." This,
too, was true.

The obvious question to ask about
Sammy Davis, Jr., is what made Sammy run. It is, alas,
too obvious, and several journalists have asked the question
in just that way over the years, describing Davis as a
variant of that familiar mid-century type: the salesman
sweating to get a promotion, the hustler ingratiating himself
with the boss while cutting his colleagues. Yet Sammy Davis is right.
He was never Sammy Glick. His insecurity and ambition
transcended the rise of the salesman, the exertions of
the hustler, to make Davis a profound symbol of the
complexities of American success and American liberalism. What made
him interesting, aside from his enormous talent --
which, much to his chagrin, was probably not enough by
itself to make him interesting for as long as he was
interesting to the American public -- was that he was so publicly desperate
as a Negro. This desperation, so naked, so dramatic, so
often self-serving, made his Jewish conversion seem
understandable, even appropriate, to many people. There
are two things that frighten the gentile about the Jew: that
the Jew wishes to be Jewish and alien, and, more
chillingly, that the Jew does not wish to be Jewish and
does not wish to be alien but to be absorbed. For many
people, it made perfect sense for him to identify with another group
that was often despised for its desperateness to fit in,
to erase itself, to assimilate.

By becoming a Jew, Davis came to
personify the crisis of postwar American liberalism in
its quest to sanctify equality and merit, difference and assimilation,
rebellion and conformity, all as expressions of
democratic values. As both a Jew and a black, Davis
represented the two groups that were fighting the hardest
for liberalism in postwar America, or, rather, were fighting hardest
for their own version of the liberal state. When this
uneasy coalition, with its myth of cross-cultural
cooperation, failed to make a liberal state that would
suit the ends of both groups, some liberal Jews then insisted that only
a colorblind state could support true liberalism, while
some liberal blacks took up the quasi-nationalist or
quasi-deconstructionist position that only a state that
continued to acknowledge the political significance of the absurd
color code it created could support true liberalism.
This difference was inevitable since, after all, most
American Jews were white and very few American blacks were
Jews. Davis never thought about these questions in such an abstract way;
he spent his life torn by what Jews had and by what
blacks wanted.

To many, Davis's public desperation
for acceptance, for success, appeared unseemly,
tasteless, and cowardly underneath its guise of defiance. For instance,
Sammy Davis, Jr., as a Jew (a conversion that some
thought he made simply because he hung around so many
Jews in the show business world and wanted to penetrate
what seemed a powerful and influential clique that had transformed
stigma into exclusivity) showed, to some minds, that
only a Negro could be that desperate not to be a
Negro. A preoccupation with racial self-hatred appears
repeatedly in Davis's interviews of the 1950s and 1960s, and suffuses
Yes I Can. On the other hand, it is worth noting
that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond and a man
who had some considerably racist notions, wished to
return to this world as Sammy Davis, Jr. ("He's the most incredibly
gifted man I've ever seen . . .," Fleming said.) As
a public figure, Sammy Davis, Jr., was a puzzle to
himself; people loved him unconditionally and despised
him violently. But this was only a reflection of how he felt
about himself.

The question -- what made Sammy run?
-- remains, even today, a real question about an
inescapably real man, who seemed both larger than life and not large
enough for the life he wanted or perhaps for the life he
deserved -- if it is possible to speak in any useful way
about people deserving a particular life. At the height
of his career, he was arguably the most famous black man
in the United States, his only possible rivals being
Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. By the mid-1960s,
Davis was a Broadway star (having headlined in Mr.
Wonderful and Golden Boy, unmemorable shows with respectable
runs); a successful recording artist, with signature
tunes like "The Birth of the Blues" and
"Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)"; a
movie and television actor so big and so widely accepted that he could appear,
for instance, on The Patty Duke Show playing
himself, something that no other black actor, no matter
how accomplished or famous, could do at the time; the
host of his own television variety show; one of the biggest
nightclub acts in history, earning more money than any
other black act in the country, almost as much as
Sinatra; a bestselling autobiographer, whose book, Yes
I Can, was one of the most widely read of its time, read
by far more people than the autobiography of any other
black person except possibly that of Malcolm X; an
ardent civil rights activist who attended the March on
Washington and the second Selma march, and did innumerable benefits
for the cause. (In the mid-1960s, Davis was donating
over $100,000 annually to various civil rights and
charitable causes, and performed in so many benefits that
he collapsed from nervous exhaustion.) Despite these considerable achievements,
instead of being loved by blacks, many of whom weigh the
achievements of their heroes by quantity or the
shrillness of their racial rhetoric rather than by
importance, he was largely despised as an Uncle Tom and a sellout. He was
the butt of jokes, an object of blatant disrespect.
Davis never stopped trying to gain acceptance from
African Americans; yet, as he wrote in Why Me?: "I
was a member of the black race but not the black community."
In his 1966 Playboy interview, Davis said,
fervently: "I would voluntarily die to have
my own people love me as much as they love some of those
goddamn phonies they think are doing so much fighting for civil
rights!" Yet Davis at times seemed willing, even
grateful, to define himself as an outsider, more fixated
on himself than his group, as when he said in Yes I
Can: "I wish I could say I live my life as a crusade,
it would be nice to get medals like 'He's a champion of
his people.' But, what I do is for me. Emotionally, I'm
still hungry and let's face it, paupers can't be
philanthropists. I can't do anybody else much good until I get me
straightened out." This was a crucial contradiction
but far from the only significant one that defined the
man.

Davis was clearly disciplined and
dedicated to his craft, yet he was subject to bouts of
debauchery and dissipation that nearly wrecked his life and
threatened to compromise his career. For instance, he
spent periods of his life hanging out with the denizens
of the hard-core porn industry and with practitioners of
Satanism. He even suggested marriage to porn star Linda Lovelace
when she was at the height of her career, cruising
Hollywood and Las Vegas as a sex toy for the rich and
famous. By Lovelace's account, Davis was not deterred by
the fact that he was married to Altovise Gore at the time or that
Lovelace was married to Chuck Traynor, or by how
scandalous it would be, how much of a joke he would
become before his public, how much he would embarrass his
family, by marrying a woman he later described as "telling stories
that were obviously the product of a tortured mind that
has been pushed, as I understand she admits, across the
boundaries of fantasy by a life of abuse and
humiliation." Davis, according to Lovelace, performed the act of
fellatio on Traynor, much to the latter's discomfort, to
see how it felt to "deep throat" someone, and,
predictably, faced public humiliation when Lovelace told
all in her controversial autobiography. He was the subject
of another tell-all graphic sex article by Kathy McKee
that appeared in Penthouse in September 1991.
Davis had died a year earlier, so was spared further embarrassment.